Wednesday, May 21, 2008

Another report from Florida

The weather here has been really miserable: hot and very humid. We had a little break with drier air and cooler breezes before Mom left, and that lingered a couple of days, but then the wind changed direction and the humidity went up. The locals say this isn’t normal, even for the summer because normally it rains, and it hasn’t really done that. If you haven’t heard, there are fires in the Everglades, and South Florida is on draught restrictions which limit watering of lawns and gardens.

We rented a car again for the weekend so that we could drive to the Tampa area and visit our friend Ginny. John worked with Ginny at American Express in Phoenix, and she was the one who convinced their boss to hire a technical writer – my first gig. We enjoyed hanging out in Ginny’s nice air-conditioned home, watching her big screen TV, and doing laundry for free, all quite luxurious for cruisers. The photo is of Ginny and her beautiful German shepherd, Beowulf.

Now we’re back on the boat working on projects while we await the repair of our radio. The manufacturer was looking at it late yesterday afternoon, and it’s on the top of their list for repairs. We still haven’t heard what the problem is or how long it will take to get it back, but we’re assuming that we’ll be here through the weekend. Once we get the radio back, we’ll check the weather forecasts for departure.

We do have friends here. Greg and Kathy on Indigo are at the marina just a few bridges up the river from us. (They’re the people we met in Key West who lived in Amsterdam for so many years.) We’ve gotten together with them a few times and plan to have them over for dinner before we leave. I hope we’ll see them more than that, but Solstice isn’t in any condition for company right now. All the provisions we’ve been buying are still out because we haven’t rigged the storage areas yet to put them away. Once we’re ready to stow things, it should go pretty fast. That should happen today or tomorrow.